Philip Southworth-Kreyche flips the page of his vintage Sears Roebuck catalog from 1917. The very long, one-button Edwardian tailcoat he spotted doesn’t get much play anymore, but he dreamt of it for his wedding day. For the most important day of his life, Kreyche would stitch it together by hand.
Punctuate that with a top hat, gray waistcoat, and early-1900s-style striped tie, and voila!—he had the Edwardian silhouette of his dreams.
However, for Kreyche, 36, a California-born history buff schooled in Texas and now living in New England, Edwardian textiles aren’t just for special occasions. He recalled walking down the street in full regalia recently, which sounds strange with today’s overly casual dress codes, but said he has his reasons.
Clothing, he said, affects the psychology of its wearer.
“There’s something about wearing these types of clothes that changes your mental state,” he told The Epoch Times. “It makes me feel orderly, it makes me feel composed and calm, it makes me feel organized, and it makes me feel more physically upright.”
His voice displayed confidence.
The stiff construction of Edwardian clothing literally holds you up. There’s physical support to match the emotional. In a heavy three-piece suit and top hat, “you feel almost like you’re in a suit of armor,” he said. “That does give anybody who wears [it] that supreme confidence to meet whatever they face.”
Edwardian couture is what our great-grandfathers, or even great-great-grandfathers, wore in the early 1900s (picture a young Harrison Ford suited up in the final scene of the first “Indiana Jones”). Somehow it looks strikingly similar to today’s clothes. “It’s the germ of most modern menswear,” Kreyche said. “Virtually everything we wear nowadays can be traced style-wise to somewhere in the Edwardian period.”
Modern clothes are pale imitations in comparison.
Edwardian was the real thing.
Edwardian clothes were flush with richness and variety. Kreyche notes the thickness and warmth of the fabric and utilitarian button-up folds that actually protect against the icy Seacoast wind. “It’s the kind of fabric that is both plush, soft, strong, breathable, and thick,” he said. He points to a purple thread running through the weave that just isn’t seen anymore. A once-endless rainbow of choices has devolved into bleak austerity.
In olden days, they had suits for work, play, and everything in between.
“Even when you were dressing casually, you were a little bit dressed up,” Kreyche said. “When men were going out into the country to go shooting or to go riding or to play tennis, they still had a suit and tie on.”
Society “wanted to look nice” all the time, he said.
Kreyche started to infuse these rich, olden pieces into his wardrobe while filmmaking in Los Angeles. He first dabbled in historic costumes from the 1920s and adopted the “Peaky Blinders” look with its classic flat cap.
A talented seamstress helped make his fashion visions a reality. She tailored vintage ties and clothes from the Victorian and Civil War eras for him. That became a lucrative business. Kreyche soon taught himself to tailor and hawked his historic wares to a ravenous online market.
“It was very successful,” Kreyche said. “People got all sorts of rewards. Some people got free suits out of it. Some people got free ties out of it.”
More people began to notice the new talent behind the sewing machine and welcomed him into a community of vintage attire enthusiasts.
Piece by piece, Edwardian attire crept into Kreyche’s closet and into his daily dress. He started with a simple historical tie and normal suit, mixed in a few period-style hats, and soon threw in a stiff collar and bowtie.
Now, Kreyche has Edwardian suits for any occasion.
Folks today wear ball caps and jeans to buy a carton of milk from the corner store. In Edwardian times, they had straw boater hats—the flat, round ones—and light, breezy summer suits. A simple blazer does nicely today at the theater. Back then, they had white-tie ensembles with capes.
Throw in a monocle? Then they were styling.
“The pride of my collection is an original 1900 black, three-piece suit,” Kreyche said. “That right now is the pièce de résistance.”
He has Panama hats and fedoras like the one Dick Tracy wore.
Kreyche’s company, Southworth Tailoring, sells the garments he handmakes. Old Sears Roebuck catalogs come in handy for that. Using them as references, he telescopes several versions of single items to create the quintessential type hybrid. Occasionally, a 1900s tie was sacrificed in the name of science.
Many fundamental techniques used 100 years ago haven’t changed, he said. The fine details? That’s another story. “There’s just a kind of fleur-de-lis kind of pattern to it. It’s beautiful,” he said, pointing to his Edwardian pocket’s stitching.
Kreyche recalled his wedding day in October 2019. He walked the aisle wearing the morning tailcoat he hand-tailored beside his now wife, Courtney. “It was in a very small chapel in the woods of New Hampshire near the coast,” he said. “The chapel was built in 1903.”
How period appropriate.
An old-fashioned church bell rang.
He said, “My wife was wearing her mother’s wedding dress.”
Kreyche’s private Edwardian revival might not be so private anymore. The world is starting to reject casualness, he says, while rediscovering how attire changes the mind of its wearer.
“When you’re wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, psychologically, you feel like you’re still in bed,” he said. “It can be fun to dress up. It can be fun to follow the rules.”
